What the Food Industry Does to Our Brains — and What Our Ancestors Already Knew

There is a quiet epidemic affecting cognitive health in Black and brown communities across this country. It shows up as brain fog, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, early memory decline. Researchers name inflammation as one of the main drivers. But the conversation too often stops at the individual plate — without following the story back to where it begins: the food system itself.

This is not a post about what you are doing wrong. It is a post about what is being done — to communities, to food systems, to the ingredients available on the corner store shelf — and what science tells us about how those conditions shape the brain. It is also about what our ancestors already knew, and why that knowledge matters now more than ever.

The brain health crisis in our communities is not a personal failing. It is the downstream consequence of upstream structural conditions.

The Science: What Inflammation Does to the Brain

The research is clear: chronic low-grade neuroinflammation — inflammation in the brain — is one of the most significant drivers of cognitive decline. It is associated with memory problems, brain fog, mood instability, and elevated risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. The foods most strongly linked to neuroinflammation are not obscure:

• ✦Ultra-processed foods — manufactured with additives, preservatives, artificial flavors, and refined ingredients that displace the nutrients the brain needs
• ✦Added sugars and high-fructose corn syrup — which trigger blood sugar spikes and inflammatory cascades, and are linked to accelerated amyloid accumulation associated with Alzheimer’s
• ✦Trans fats — found in partially hydrogenated oils and many packaged foods, associated with oxidative stress in brain cells and disrupted neurotransmitter function
• ✦Refined carbohydrates — stripped of fiber, they cause rapid glucose spikes that impair cognitive function and deprive the brain of the steady nourishment it requires
• ✦Excessive alcohol — which depletes B vitamins essential to brain function and disrupts the neurotransmitter systems that govern memory, mood, and learning

Research published in JAMA Neurology found that diets high in ultra-processed foods were associated with a 28% faster rate of cognitive decline. A 2023 study in Nature Mental Health found significant associations between ultra-processed food consumption and depression, anxiety, and cognitive disorders. These are not rare findings. They are converging from multiple directions.

These are also not foods people choose out of ignorance. These are the foods that dominate the landscape of disinvested communities — neighborhoods, disproportionately Black and brown, where no full-service grocery store operates within a reasonable distance.

Food Apartheid Is a Brain Health Issue

Food justice advocates have rightly challenged the term “food desert.” It implies a natural landscape rather than a deliberate outcome. The more accurate term is food apartheid — the system of policy choices, disinvestment, and structural racism that concentrates food insecurity in communities of color while concentrating food abundance in wealthier, whiter ones.

Redlining concentrated poverty in specific zip codes. Disinvestment followed. Grocery stores left. Fast food chains and corner stores — stocked primarily with ultra-processed food — remained and multiplied. Meanwhile, the food industry spent billions targeting Black and brown communities with marketing for the same products most linked to neuroinflammation. Research from the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health documented that Black youth see more than twice as many ads for sugary drinks, fast food, and candy as their white peers. This is not accident. It is strategy.

And the stress of poverty, racism, housing instability, and chronic threat is itself neuroinflammatory — compounding dietary effects at the cellular level. You cannot separate what a community eats from the conditions in which they live. Brain health is a justice issue.

The brain is not separate from its environment. When we ask what communities are eating, we must also ask: what is available? What is affordable? What has been deliberately placed there — and by whom?

What Our Ancestors Already Knew

Long before neuroinflammation became a clinical term, our ancestors built food traditions around the very principles science is now documenting. What researchers now call the “Mediterranean diet” — high in plants, legumes, whole grains, fish, and healthy fats, low in ultra-processed food and added sugar — shares deep roots with ancestral African, Caribbean, and Indigenous food systems.

West African food traditions centered leafy greens, tubers, legumes, and fermented foods. Injera — the Ethiopian flatbread made from teff, one of the most nutrient-dense grains on earth — was served alongside lentils and vegetables in meals that supported both gut and brain health. Caribbean food culture honored okra, plantain, callaloo, dasheen, and herbs that science now recognizes as powerfully anti-inflammatory. Across the African diaspora, community meals were built around whole ingredients, seasonal rhythms, and shared preparation — practices that modern nutritional science is still catching up to.

These were not coincidences. Our grandmothers knew things that did not require peer review to validate. Colonialism, enslavement, and forced displacement disrupted these food systems — replacing ancestral diets with the cheapest, most processed food available. Reclaiming traditional foods is not nostalgia. It is a brain health practice. It is an act of resistance.

What Nourishes the Brain — and How We Access It Together

The brain thrives on what our ancestors had in abundance before displacement disrupted it: leafy greens and vegetables rich in folate and antioxidants; omega-3 fatty acids from fish, walnuts, and flaxseed; legumes and whole grains that provide steady glucose without the inflammatory spikes of refined carbohydrates; fermented foods that support the gut-brain axis; and turmeric, ginger, rosemary, and other herbs that reduce inflammation at the cellular level.

But knowing what nourishes is only useful when access follows. Community food sovereignty — communities controlling their own food systems — is a brain health movement. Community gardens, food co-ops, mutual aid pantries stocked with whole foods, cooking circles that carry traditional recipes across generations — these are public health interventions. They are also ancestral practices that our communities have always known.

Cooking together is medicine. So is the garden your neighbor tends. So is the recipe your grandmother passed down. Community is the food system our ancestors built — and reclaiming it is one of the most powerful collective brain health practices we have.

The Village Feeds Itself

At Ubuntu Village, we believe that brain health is a community matter — rooted in access, in ancestral knowledge, and in the structural conditions that determine what our people can eat. When chronic disease falls hardest on those with the least access to what prevents it, that is not a personal health story. That is a justice story.

I am because we are. The food our grandmothers grew, gathered, and prepared together was not just sustenance. It was medicine, and it was love. Reclaiming it — through community, through advocacy, through the simple act of cooking together — is how we heal.

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References

1. Goncalves et al. — Association Between Consumption of Ultraprocessed Foods and Cognitive Decline. JAMA Neurology, 2023
2. New York Times — Ultra-processed food and mental health (2023)
3. Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health — Food marketing to communities of color
4. Mayo Clinic — Mediterranean Diet and Brain Health
5. Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands — ancestral embodied knowledge
6. Exercise and Alzheimer’s: How to Keep Your Brain Healthy — Ubuntu Village

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Related Reading

• ‣ Epigenetics and Ancestral Memory: What Your Body Remembers
• ‣ The Body Keeps the Ancestors
• ‣ Reparations and Healing: A Public Health Argument
• ‣ Colonialism and Global Health Policy

Michele Mitchell is the Founder, President & CEO of Ubuntu Village Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit rooted in East Harlem, New York, with programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. A writer, advocate, and community strategist working at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, public health, and community power, Michele leads Ubuntu Village’s work to center communities as the protagonists of their own healing. She writes from the conviction that science and spirit are complementary, that healing is relational, and that community is the medicine.